Is there any way to return HTML in a PHP function? (without building the return value as a string)

Question

I have a PHP function that I\'m using to output a standard block of HTML. It currently looks like this:

Answer 1

Template File

{title}
{username}

PHP

if (($text = file_get_contents("file.html")) === false) {
    $text = "";
}

$text = str_replace("{title}", "Title Here", $text);
$text = str_replace("{username}", "Username Here", $text);

then you can echo $text as string